Best Improbably Poems

Suspended improbably on shoulders
Hunched by years of glacial attrition
And threaded through a forest of boulders:
The path that holds the key to my mission
I speak allegorically, because
This tortured path has ne’er been seen before
And every rock is a problem that was
And every chasm is an open...

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HER WONDERFUL MOTHER NATURE


Once upon her entering and exiting  
Her comings and goings
Groceries, gym or mall
Mother Nature made the mirrors love her
All-knowing reflection,  
No adjustments needed... 
Please...not one correction
Causing confusion, she's unflawed
Everywhere, in every room, claiming, stealing all attention
Gorgeous green eyed-snake women start...

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I came to AllSouls
looking for permanent sanctuary.

Sanctuary,
not only from a Rumpian absence of 
civility
and non-violent trust
and integrity
and compassion,
but also pro-actively for an orthodox health eco-school 
for learning to secure these passioned gifts
through cooperative
pro-active
co-arising practice.

A permanently green sanctuary for integrity
is asking too improbably much
from some,
like myself,
so...

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I was in the shotgun seat
in 1960 Lansing Michigan
headed straight as a harddrive
through ghettoizing "Negra Section"
hunting down our commercial whitebread 
heavenly ThriftyAcres

Wanna be a WalMart ImPlantation
but not Southern enough,
somehow,
to withstand straight-male competition
in fluent White Privileged culture
favoring evangelical
flavoring monotheistic 
monoculturing AnthroSupremacists
fueling Future Farmers

Kinda like 
patriarchal-capitalist
****-retentive pathological...

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POEMS ABOUT POOL SHARKS

Shark
by Michael R. Burch

They are all unknowable,
these rough pale men—
haunting dim pool rooms like shadows,
propped up on bar stools like scarecrows,
nodding and sagging in the fraying light...

I am not of them,
as I glide among them—
eliding the amorphous camaraderie
they are as unlikely to...

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There have been moments in my life enjoyed
more for the forest than the fallen leaves.
White drops of ink that improbably bleed
right off their journal to rupture the void
no one had known existed ‘til destroyed
by the birth of a daughter her father needs
in such a way...

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A vertical sliver pries into the doorway, a beam from the watchful eye in the hall
While amber stars in cages, captives in lampposts, shout prophecies beneath the moon
Obscured by trees
Their cries filter into the window
And uniform basketball players with fake simulated faces run improbably about...

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Tonight I heard a terminally cancered 
yet not cancelled
singer songwriter say
"I can't wait for life to not be hard
before choosing to be happy."

She spoke well from her own experience
and I remain moved,
but also curiously confused
about physical v mental
hardness.

For someone with chronic depression
or suffering from loneliness,
chronic...

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Framed blemish.
Heavy as a tumor.
Solid as surrender.
Dig into epidermis.
Uproot the moment.
Unclean kernel.

Hard, cold reflection.
Show me pretty.
Clogged pores.
Yellow teeth.
Rheumy eyes.
Ugly is as ugly does.

Smile at the mirror. 
Try to forget.
This is you. 
Forever unlovely.
Look at what you did.
Children are so cruel.

Rose scented perfume.
Disguise the stench.
Excrete from...

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We went to climb trees
in the jungle gyms of green apple orchards,
bare legs dangled
toes dipped into shady pools of sky.

Secret girlfriends climbed barefooted
onto impossibly roomy branches,
their skirts improbably short,
in the swinging bowers.

Memory plays its tricks
perhaps it was in a golden cornfield
that the apples turned red...

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I hate me
More than any of you could
Still i am
The man who stood
Gravity couldn't pull me down
Looking through space
From the outside in
Taking each pain with a widening grin
Improbably Probable
normally curious
but curiously abnormal
Sliding down elongated giraffes necks
with glee stolen from innocence
Outwith so small to the vastness...

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Streams: It's so improbably wonderful that
the trickle of a lazy stream can eventually
join the chorus of a powerful ocean.


ocean's lions roar

  above mighty sea birds soar
  
     streams trickle on in






        ...

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POEMS ABOUT POOL SHARKS

Fair Game
by Michael R. Burch

At the Tennessee State Fair,
the largest stuffed animals hang tilt-a-whirl over the pool tables
with mocking button eyes,
knowing the playing field is unlevel,
that the rails slant, ever so slightly, north or south,
so that gravity is always on their side,
conspiring...

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Up here, where the lone trees grow, the air is clear and the time is now.

Up here, where the lone trees grow, my emotions alternate between what I see and what I know.

The only easy way into this desecrated corner of paradise is by way...

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